This NAIDOC Week marks a significant milestone, celebrating its 50th anniversary under the theme '50 Years of Deadly'. The establishment of NAIDOC Week has always been about honouring First Nations histories while, crucially, looking toward First Nations futures. This edition of Art Agenda celebrates contemporary First Nations artists working in photography, highlighting the ongoing innovation and development they bring to the future of the field.

First Nations people have an understandably troubling history with the idea of photography. In its early development, the medium was used to document and categorise Aboriginal people, reducing them to objects of curiosity. It was not until artists from these communities gained access to the medium themselves that a more balanced and self-determined form of representation began to emerge. Artists such as Mervyn Bishop, Tracey Moffatt, Ricky Maynard, Richard Bell and Michael Riley have paved the way for an emerging generation of photographers interested in the representation of community, self and Country.

A new exhibition, CIPX Kaurna Miyurna (Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange with the Kaurna Community), opens June 26 at the Art Gallery of South Australia. Kaurna artists James Tylor and Damien Shen have created a series of portraits of members of the Kaurna community in Tarntanya (Adelaide), on Kaurna Yarta. This project sits within the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX), an international Indigenous portraiture project first conceived by Will Wilson, a Diné (Navajo) artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. The CIPX project invites Indigenous photographers from around the world to create portraits of members of their local communities using the nineteenth-century tintype process. In doing so, First Nations artists are actively reclaiming the technology that originally marginalised their people.

Artists such as Tony Albert, in his current exhibition Not a Souvenir at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (running until 19 October), explore the power and immediacy of portraiture. Not a Souvenir is a mid-career survey of the artist’s practice and includes works from his 2020 Brothers series. These works, presented in stained glass forms made in conjunction with Canberra Glassworks, feature portraits of Aboriginal youths with painted targets on their chests. These images tacitly allude to ‘mug shots’ but conversely capture the humanity of the subjects. The series examines racial profiling and the very real threat that First Nations people face from police contact, including the spectre of deaths in custody.

Self-portraiture is another powerful way that First Nations artists are reclaiming selfhood. Contemporary artists such as Dr Christian Thompson AO and Dennis Golding use the self as a starting point for examining identity. Dennis Golding’s work Untitled, Botany Bay (2018) features the artist cloaked in a cape, looking out across Kamay (Botany Bay). This heroic pose, complete with a superhero-like cape, reflects ongoing workshops Golding conducts with children where they design their own capes. The garment becomes representational of empowerment and a boundless future.

Dr Christian Thompson AO’s work has been a continual exploration of identity. His practice has been defined by the act of documenting himself in sculptural assemblages and performances. His mixed background of Bidjara, Chinese-Australian, Irish, and Sephardic Jewish descent is considered deeply in a questioning of belonging and self.

Artist Hayley Millar Baker’s striking series of self-portraits entitled Life, In Death (2024) features in the current exhibition New Religion at Ngununggula (running until October 18). These seven works feature different self-portraits of the artist displayed in a line, forming a poem forged in the artist's relationship to the upheaval and tumult of world events—from the failed Voice referendum to Gaza.

Veteran artist Nici Cumpston OAM’s new exhibition Water Bodies opens 3 July at the Kingston Arts Centre in Canberra, continuing the artist’s exploration of documenting the Barka River in New South Wales. These landscapes encapsulate the idea that a portrait of Country is equally a portrait of its people.

All of these exhibitions represent an invitation to actively engage with First Nations culture this NAIDOC Week and celebrate innovation, resistance and survival.

NAIDOC Week runs from 5–12 July.